Lawmakers Seeking Task Force On Drones

With technology rapidly changing, a bipartisan group of legislators said Monday that they are leaning toward forming a task force to study the use and potential misuse of flying drones.

The legislature's judiciary committee conducted a lengthy hearing on a bill that would impose the state's first regulations on the unmanned aircraft.

Drones are used chiefly by the military at present, but improving technology, decreasing prices and the expected loosening of regulations by the Federal Aviation Administration could change things sharply in 2015. Legislators say that drones could start to take off in the Connecticut skies and their use could jump by leaps and bounds.

The Connecticut Police Chiefs Association has asked for the legislature to create a special task force to study the issues instead of passing a bill to regulate drones. The chief proponents of the bill — Rep. Matthew Ritter of Hartford and Rep. James Albis of East Haven — both said Monday that they would be open to analyzing the issues further.

Rep. Rosa Rebimbas, a Naugatuck Republican who serves as the ranking House member on the committee, said that passing legislation too quickly could be a mistake.

"I would love the additional time to look at what other states have done,'' Rebimbas said. "I do think the right people need to be serving on that task force."

Cromwell Police Chief Anthony Salvatore, chairman of the chiefs association's legislative committee, said the biggest problem with the bill is the requirement that police obtain a warrant in advance for video or photographs picked up by a drone to be used as evidence. Under the proposed legislation, if a drone inadvertently picked up video of a crime that was in progress but was not mentioned in the warrant, the information could not be used for prosecution, he said.

Citing the example of the Travelers golf championship held in Cromwell, Salvatore said, "If I was to fly a drone over the course, and if we observe illegal activity in someone's backyard [near the course], the way I read it, we couldn't do anything about it."

He said delaying immediate action on the bill would not be a problem because the state already has laws to cover various issues, such as penalties in case a drone was ever used to transport a bomb.

"There are enough statutes out there today,'' Salvatore told legislators. "We do have [laws governing] video stalking, video voyeurism. There are other statutes that could address it at this time."

But David J. McGuire, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Connecticut, said the legislature needs to act quickly to prevent the misuse of drones that could threaten personal privacy as the infant technology begins to grow. Drones already comes in various shapes and sizes — some as small as a hummingbird — and need to be regulated, he said.

"It sounds like science fiction, but the technology is here now,'' McGuire said.

One of the most prominent uses of a drone recently came when Branford volunteer firefighter Peter W. Sachs used a drone to gauge the intensity of a fire near explosives at a quarry in the Stony Creek section of Branford in January. When the drone showed that the explosives were 30 to 40 feet away from the raging fire, the department determined that a firetruck could be sent safely into the area to extinguish the blaze. Sachs, an attorney, said he was called to the scene at the town-owned quarry and, once there, flew his drone to spot the exact location of the fire on the video feed.

Sachs testified against the bill Monday, saying that it would restrict law enforcement too much by limiting the use of video captured by drones.

"If you inadvertently pick up something that is not part of the warrant,'' Sachs said, "you cannot use it, and it has to be destroyed.''

McGuire argued that Connecticut needs to get out in front of a fast-growing technology.

"Drones are where personal computers were 30 years ago,'' he told lawmakers. "They will explode in the next 15 years. … The last thing that should happen is that this is kicked to the next session.''

The judiciary committee's session Monday marked the first public hearing on drones. No votes were taken. The committee's deadline to act on bills is April 2, and the short legislative session is scheduled to end May 7.